Side blog for art stuff

Line art

The characters are actually drawn at a pretty low resolution. Hence the jaggies. The lines are ALMOST uniform thickness, enough that I'm going to just do that, and they're pretty thin. The thin lines are important because. If you compare them to Digimon data squad (which sometimes has very thick lines) it's very obvious.

The actual size of the pen does depend on how far the subject is from the camera, so I'll probably find collate reference images.

Pen settings below. Mili pen with smart shape works super well. I've gone with the first anti-aliasing option, not for the jaggi one. I don't imagine they ever expected anyone to see any jaggies when viewed on a CRT television, so don't think it should be considered part of the art style.

This guide isn't concerned with the actual drawing part, but obviously references to the show should be used as examples. Don't draw too many lines.

Reference images exist for all the classic seasons, and shows like 2020 and beat break use almost the exact same line style, and often the new shows reuse old style references.

I'm out of images so I guess part 2 will be shading and colours.

My method atm is to make a shading line layer, and a highlight line layer. These can then be filled with the bucket tool. Using the same mili pen settings as above, and setting it to reference the Lineart layer, you can then fill with colour without leaving any artefacts

Layers:

Colouring and shading should be done with black lines, flat colours, a shadow layer and a highlight layer. As follows:

Here, I kept the shadow line layer and highlight line layer, duplicating them to make the shadow fill layer and highlight fill layer, but this was mostly to preserve the progress as I was working things out, and I don't think I'll keep these layers in future.

In this example, yellow and dark blue have been used as highlights and shadows. The value of the colour DOES matter, but the colour itself does not. Dark blue was dark enough for most of the image, except his neck, so I changed this to black layer (using the ignore transparent pixels function). Black would have been too dark to shade his blond hair.

After you've put the lines in, you can fill them with the bucket, referring to the black Lineart layer.

Layer multiply settings

Okay, so

- the shadow layer must be set to DARKEN

- the highlight layer must be set to LIGHTEN

- and the flat colour layer must be set to COLOR

I ended up turning off the underlying white paper layer, because it fucks with the multiply layers

And again, the darken only works if the shadow layer is darker than the flat colour. So that's why some of the colour is blue, some is black. Blue, or a colour that matches the scene (like green), works. Black is too dark, in general, tho on blackwargreymon's neck it has to be black, or else it actually lightens instead of darkens.

Reference image (traced, colour picked for the flats, but using the shading layer as seen above to generate shadows and highlights) :

Seems pretty perfect to me, and certainly good enough. Most importantly it's quick and fun.